Simon Yates has won the first Grand Tour stage of his career, launching a late attack to win today’s Stage 6 of the Vuelta at Luintra Ribeiro Sacro.
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Victory for the twin of fellow cyclist Adam Yates was his second win of the season and comes only six weeks after he returned from a four-month suspension for testing positive for the banned asthma drug terbutaline, following an in-competition drug test after stage six of the Paris-Nice in March.
Colombian Darwin Atapuma (BMC) still leads Spanish veteran Valverde by 28 seconds in the general classification, with Froome, the triple Tour de France champion, poised in third place four seconds behind.
Yates set out after late chaser Dani Moreno, whose Movistar team had led the pursuit, and passed both Moreno and Frank to ride alone to the finish.
The break took a long time to get established and with just under fifty kilometres gone, Laurent Didier (Trek-Segafredo), Kevin Reza (FDJ), Andrey Zeits (Astana), Jan Bakelants (AG2R – La Mondiale), Alberto Losada (Katusha), Gert Dockx (Lotto Soudal), José Mendes and Gregor Muhlberger (Bora-Argon18), Omar Fraile (Dimension Data), Mathias Frank (IAM Cycling) and Valerio Conti (Lampre – Merida), managed to slip away. Contador remained nearly 2 minutes behind. It wasn’t planned we just wanted to make it a hard race. “I timed my attack to perfection”.
Frank attacked over the summit but his lead over the returning pack had come down to less than a minute as the business end of the stage approached.
The relatively short ban was due to the UCI’s anti-doping tribunal accepting that Yates’s team doctor had failed to secure the necessary therapeutic use exemption for the rider, who is asthmatic.
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Spain’s Alejandro Valverde is now sitting second going into Stage 7, a 158.5km trek from Maceda to Puebla de Sanabria.
